On 12/31/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
According to Draper (and I agree), Marx's theory of revolution can be summed up by the notion that the liberation of the working class can only be truly won by the working class itself.
It seems to me that the working class have and will be always politically divided, between those who struggle for liberation, those who struggle against liberation, and those who are apolitical and just want to mind their own business, and the same applies to other classes and strata like peasants, small shop-keepers, men and women of letters "of independent means," and so on. So, "the working class in and for themselves" have not and will not make any revolution.
This principle applies even in non-revolutionary situations under a lot of different situations. The Cuban revolution, for example, has achieved a lot of liberation of the Cuban people not because of the smart and principled leadership of Fidel Castro. Rather, it's because of the participation of the Cuban people in decision-making (partly as a result of the Bay of Pigs invasion, which mobilized people).
If that were true, workers, allied with peasants, could override the decisions made by the leadership to restore capitalism, rapidly as in the USSR or gradually as in China. But they didn't in the USSR and they haven't in China.
This principle is a replacement for those of liberalism. Liberalism -- as I understand it -- relies on notions of inherent human rights. But human rights have to be won via struggle (or luck, but we can't rely on that).
Liberals don't disagree that rights have to be won. The theory of political liberalism arose from struggle -- beginning with the English Civil War in the early modern period -- to win rights to begin with.
before that, we also had socialist barbarism (e.g., rule by Stalin, Mao) alongside capitalist barbarism (imperialism).
Two problems here: Can we still claim workers are the agents of their own emancipation when they let themselves be ruled by Stalin, Mao, etc.? In no socialist revolution has there been a successful revolution within the revolution, of the sort that Trotsky, et al. hoped for, against the bureaucratic power elite that came to dominate it and eventually decided to restore capitalism. Do socialists today still really believe that workers in the West will one day desire socialism and establish it in their rich countries, despite the memory of socialist barbarism that weighs like a nightmare on their brains? If they do, do they have any ideas about how? -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
